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Mind Sports Rampant

6.15.12

International draughts master Alex Mogilyansky with board and checkers in Langdell Library

Courtesy of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Master players of chess, bridge,
poker, Go, and international draughts convened at Harvard Law School on June 13
to discuss how such “mind sports” might enhance learning in schools and
libraries, and even contribute to building civic life in communities “with an
Olympic vision.” The daylong conference, “Bringing Mind Sports into the
Classroom and Beyond,” drew 24 invited participants from the education and library
worlds as well as the game masters.

Weld professor of
law Charles Nesson, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (which
co-sponsored the symposium with the Law School and the United States Mind Sports
Association), led the proceedings, with his daughter Rebecca Nesson
’98, J.D. ’01, Ph.D. ’09, of Public Radio
Exchange, as co-leader. He began the
day by having conference-goers play a few hands of “one-card war,” a simplified
version of poker because, as he declared, “the way to start any meeting is by playing something.” (Symmetrically, the
conference concluded after dinner with a longer session of poker in the reading
room of Langdell Library.)

“Education
must strike a balance between physical and mental sports,” said Nesson, who has
used poker to teach strategic thinking to his law students for nearly three
decades. “Teaching kids, we can use the notion of starting with play—which is
where they are. Schools tend to turn
them off at certain points: fractions and algebra are just death on math for so
many kids. But in a game, they aren’t just abstract symbols, but tools.”

Anthony Holden, author
of Big Deal, a 2007 book on his life
during a year as a professional poker player and first president of the International Federation of
Poker, moderated the first session of the formal program, a series of
“lightning talks” by the masters of the games.

Holden touched on a theme of the
day: mind sports mirror life away from the gaming table. “Things that can go
wrong in poker have parallels in things that can go wrong in life,” he
declared. “You are caught out in a bluff in poker—maybe you are caught out in a
lie in life. And in both cases, one big challenge is keeping your ego under
control.”

Poker expert Jim McManus,
author of Cowboys Full: The Story of
Poker (2009), called poker “the American mind sport—the game that is
closest to the free-market system. The language of poker is money, and the goal
is to win as many chips—as much money—as possible.” He observed that the “American
national character has two threads”—the “entrepreneurial cowboy spirit and the
Puritan work ethic. The entrepreneurial side loves poker, but the Puritan side
finds it abhorrent that people would risk a lot of money in a game.” McManus noted that as the descendants of
immigrants, Americans come from “the most risk-happy 2 percent of the
population.”

Poker
was a centerpiece of game theory, he explained, saying that mathematician John
von Neumann, one of the founders of game theory, had no interest in games of
“complete information” like checkers and chess, where both players can access
all relevant data and hence “there is no room for deceit, ambush, bluffing, or
any role for guile or luck.”

Andy
Okun, president of the American Go Association,
countered that although Go might be a game of complete information, “there is
no way to exhaust all the possibilities,” and that a player who launches an
attack doesn’t necessarily know if the opponent realizes what is afoot. He
showed how one can teach Go to beginners, including children, with a 9 x 9
square board instead of the standard, but more intimidating, 19 x 19 board. He
described an animated cartoon, about a teen who contacts the spirit of a
deceased Go master after finding an old board in the attic, as another way to
interest young people.

The
Go board is large enough that in the endgame, several different battles can be
in progress, and a player has to learn “how to play multiple games when you can
only make one move at a time.” He drew a parallel to the late phase of a U.S.
presidential election campaign, when there are several swing states in play,
but a candidate can only be in one place at a time and has a limited fund of
money to spend in different places. “Americans are used to strategic thought,”
Okun said. “But they aren’t necessarily trained
in strategic thought.”

International
grandmaster Maurice Ashley
called chess “a game of geometric relationships, dramatized.” He noted that the
chess pieces move in ways consistent with Euclidean geometry, and that “you
have to make all these geometric relationships work together. You can destroy
the other person’s pieces with your heroes of linearity.” Chess teaches “concentration, problem-solving,
the need to think before you act,” he said, adding that chess has done a good
job of getting into school systems; a New York City
chess-in-the-schools program, for example, has served 400,000 students
since 1986.

In
contract bridge, unlike the other mind sports, players work with a partner, and
so “to be a good player, you have to be a good partner,” said Howard Weinstein, a
former options trader who became a World Life Master in bridge. “You need to be
a good communicator, and be able to help your partner out. The top partnerships
are like marriages.” He reported that some complex bridge bidding systems are
based on the Fibonacci series; like poker, bridge is a game of calculation,
with plenty of psychology and unknown information. And “you have to put
yourself in the minds of the opponents.”

International
draughts master Alex
Mogilyansky, who has coached three world
champions in his game, announced, “We should have children play all the mind
sports,” comparing them to the pentathlon and decathlon in track. His own game ignores
the standard American checkerboard, an 8 x 8 arrangement with 64 squares like a
chessboard, to use a 100-square, 10 x 10 board, producing a far more complex
game. Mogilyansky was, as a youth, a star checkers player in the Soviet Union
who received a full-time government salary (“three times that of an engineer”)
to play draughts. Yet he emigrated to
the United States, and is now one of this country’s top players. He believes
that American education needs a shot in the arm. “I have a 13-year-old daughter who is one of
the best at math at one of the best schools, and she doesn’t know math at all,” he said. “The system of
education in the United States is terrible.”

The
director of MIT’s Media Lab,Joi Ito, took part in the conference, as did Amy
Handelsman ’76, executive director of the United States Mind Sports Association
and the United States Poker Federation. They spoke on a panel focused on mind
sports as “an element in the civic construction of local community.” Handelsman
quoted a friend who called mind sports “a way to make nerds cool.”

“One
challenge is to convince educators and administrators of the relevance of mind
sports to the real world,” said Ashley, the chess master. “Chess has largely
resolved that—but less so for bridge, Go, poker, and checkers. We have to be
very clear in drawing those connections.” There are distinct parallels between
chess and science, for example, he pointed out: “Chess is one of the few areas
where experts try to falsify their own hypotheses immediately.” Furthermore,
“after a game, you look at your game [all moves are recorded]. When you do that
with kids, they see how their decisions have consequences, and see where they
made mistakes—they’ll try to avoid making the same error twice.”

One
challenge poker encounters, Holden said, “is the perception that poker means
gambling.” In fact, he emphasized, there are 60 million to 70 million online
poker players pursuing the game with no money changing hands. McManus and
others are advancing the cause of (non-gambling) “duplicate poker,” tournaments
in which hands are pre-dealt and so all players have a chance to show their
skill holding the same cards.

The future, and
the upside, of mind sports in the classroom and community loom large. “All five
mind sports work online,” Holden said. “There is huge potential for expansion.”
Nesson took satisfaction in the conference’s effort “to conceive and express
mind sports as an educational venture. These ideas are templates, capable of
being replicated.”

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A spirited moment for the women's lacrosse players. Harvard athletics plays an important role in the lives of the nearly one-fifth of undergraduates who participate in intercollegiate sports.Photograph courtesy of Harvard Athletic Communications

You Might Also Like:

A spirited moment for the women's lacrosse players. Harvard athletics plays an important role in the lives of the nearly one-fifth of undergraduates who participate in intercollegiate sports.Photograph courtesy of Harvard Athletic Communications